« Information Leakage

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

• Outdated dependencies
• Retired dependencies
• Dependencies with known vulnerabilities
• Insufficient due-diligence when adding 3rd party components
• Insufficient visibility into 3rd party components

Outdated dependencies

Critical security fixes are often only made available in the latest and greatest version of 3rd party packages, When an application’s dependencies are falling behind the currently available releases, this may impact the ability to quickly apply fixes as they are released. When a dependency upgrade is non-trivial, it is probably best to plan the upgrade while there is no pressure to get a security fix deployed.

The Mix task mix hex.outdated displays a list of available package updates. Remember to also check other sources of 3rd party dependencies for updates, such as NPM or the OS package manager.

Having said that, upgrading dependencies should not be done without verifying that the changes are legitimate and unlikely to introduce new security vulnerabilities or even backdoors (see Insufficient due-diligence when adding 3rd party components).

Retired dependencies

Package owners can mark a Hex package version as retired, to discourage the use of those particular versions. Existing users should consider upgrading to a newer version or, if the package itself is discontinued, switching to another package.

A package version may be retired for a number of reasons, it does not necessarily mean the version has a security vulnerability, and conversely, a known vulnerability does not necessarily mean that the version will be retired. Nevertheless, it is good practice to periodically check whether a project relies on retired package versions using the mix hex.audit task, and to investigate the reason and available mitigations.

Dependencies with known vulnerabilities

While Hex provides built-in tooling for handling outdated or retired packages, it does not provide information on known vulnerabilities in Hex packages. There are a number of free and commercial tools to check whether a project has a known vulnerable dependency.

The free Mix task mix deps.audit checks a project’s dependencies against the known vulnerabilities in the Elixir Security Advisories repository. Another approach would be to generate a Software Bill-of-Materials (SBoM) for the project, and ingest the SBoM in a tool that can cross-reference the list against vulnerability databases (see Insufficient visibility into 3rd party components).

Some commercial offerings with Elixir support (in no particular order):

• GitHub’s Dependabot
  • Dependabot for GitLab
• Snyk
• Paraxial.io
• Mend Renovate

Insufficient due-diligence when adding 3rd party components

Introducing new 3rd party dependencies, or updating them, is always a liability: code that was written by potentially untrusted or unknown parties becomes part of a project. This 3rd party code not only affects the way the application behaves at runtime, but may also execute code on the developer’s local machine or build servers. Such code could potentially disable security features of the application, introduce backdoors, steal information from the application or the development environments, etc.

Whenever dependencies are introduced or updated, review the code being introduced to make sure it is not malicious and does not negatively affect security (or quality, performance, stability) of the application. Reviewing the release notes is a good start, but it is not enough: a malicious package maintainer is unlikely to document their backdoors there.

The mix hex.diff tool shows the exact changes in the Hex package archive, in a friendly format. It may seem a daunting task to review large diffs, but presumably it is much less work than implementing the functionality of the updated package yourself. If it is not, ask yourself if you are not better off dropping the dependency rather than upgrading it.

Insufficient visibility into 3rd party components

Software supply chain management is about more than just security vulnerabilities. Application developers should have full visibility into the 3rd party components used in their projects for a number of reasons:

• Vulnerability tracking, by correlating information in the SBoM with known vulnerabilities
• Licence compliance, by verifying that no packages with inappropriate/incompatible licences are introduced, and producing the required copyright notices for the entire project
• Due diligence, e.g. sharing the SBoM or a human readable copy thereof with customers or other parties

Common open standard SBoM formats are CycloneDX and SPDX. Tools exist to produce SBoMs in these formats for many languages, including Elixir and Erlang.

Once produced, the SBoM can be ingested into a variety of tools, such as Dependency-Track. Ideally, SBoM generation and ingestion happens automatically as part of the project’s CI/CD pipeline.